Fotografia Publica: Photography in Print 1919-1939
Curios
Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic
Valencia
The Art of Whitfield Lovell
Stolen Harvest
Live From the Hong Kong Nile Club

Fotografia Publica: Photography in Print 1919-1939
Edited by Horacio Fernández
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, $55
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Designed as the catalog for a museum show that originated in Spain last spring, Fotografía Pública is an invaluable, accessible reference to a period when avant-garde photography did some of its liveliest experimentation in public. The two decades between the world wars—a time when the boundaries between high and low culture were eroding fast—found virtually all the modernist masters working in the commercial realm, primarily in periodicals and books. Berenice Abbott, El Lissitzky, Man Ray, Brassaï, Walker Evans, Aleksandr Rodchenko, John Heartfield, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and countless others were turning out innovative, important pictures for magazines from Life to Minotaure, and establishing new levels of visual literacy all over the world. Fotografía Pública, organized like an encyclopedia, devotes individual entries to artists, graphic designers, and the magazines they worked for—all illustrated with full-context photos of the actual page spreads. Though the book's selection seems a bit arbitrary, with entries for Vogue, Vu, and Tina Modotti but not Harper's Bazaar, Verve, or Lisette Model, its truly international range and image-packed design make it an art director's dream and a photo maven's idea of heaven. —Vince Aletti

Curios
By Judith Taylor
Sarabande Books, 71 pp., $12.95
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Reminiscent of the jewel-like marbles, shot glasses, and lemon-colored corks dreamily set in a Joseph Cornell box, Judith Taylor's debut collection, Curios, is full of her own poetic musings on life's small details—from Viceroys cigarettes to leopard bustiers. These details are described so that daily baubles become ineffable markers of painful and quirky memories: "I wanted her to wear a large bird or a bathtub on her head, to prove she was my mother."

Taylor's poetry is patterned in seven and eight line stanzas, but her poems are more like assemblages of introspective non sequiturs that nevertheless deeply echo one another's sentiments. "There are certain sentences I will never say aloud./What's that roiling on the table, bouncing off the wall?/Mood, mood." Her poems are free associations that have been rigorously pared down so that the shifts between ideas are deliberate rather than meteoric acts of spontaneity.

Taylor's most energetic work uses objects as springboards for sexually suggestive memories. In "Paper Dolls," she writes, "One breaks from the rest, or an arm appears, a leg, from another doll. Now she is excessive, interesting/As a child I saw a film: a man stood over a beautiful laughing woman, raised his riding crop." But Taylor eschews dense psychological welter by swiftly moving the poem back to the miniature: "Do the scissors make the mistake, or does the hand?"

Elsewhere her references to fantasy flirtatiously mingle with the mundane: "I thought of myself as Dorothy or Alice on loan to the middle class." Taylor's elisions of personal history sometimes leave the reader wanting more. This is especially so when she digs up vague ephemera to invoke the female condition—Southern belles, screens, masks, geisha, and ghosts. Here, her ruminations border on candied whimsy rather than oblique wisdom: "Why are most Japanese ghosts women? . . . Ghosts: shy women."

But if Taylor is prey to sound bites that rattle on the page, we slowly realize that her obsession with the detritus of daily life is a knowing diversion: "The necklace of his breath, the belt of his sweat: acquisitions to stave off loss." Aware that the objects she accrues are residues of loved ones lost, Taylor is at her best when she assumes a melancholic candor: "Let's wait for the l'heure bleu when shadows slip back into their objects, when mothy illusions console us." —Cathy Hong

Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism
By Daniel Harris
Basic Books, 270 pp., $24
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After pondering consumerism's fine print as intimately as anyone should, acerbic cultural critic Daniel Harris has, shockingly, found much of it to be dishonest. His close reading nails everything from the rhetoric of household cleansers ("simultaneously militaristic and ladylike") to the lie of back-to-nature ("the more destructive a product is to either the environment or our own bodies, the more prominently images of nature figure in the way it is advertised"). He's sometimes brilliant, frequently exasperating, and usually deliriously overstated—a camp Adorno rampaging through our supermarket aisles and shopping malls.

On one level he's grossly unfair. (Do people really take ad copy so seriously that they think a Ghirardelli sundae is literally "so good, it's sinful"?) But when Harris hacks gleefully away at deliciousness in food advertising—hype like "off-the-chart delicious" documents our distance from real freshness—even the most dedicated shopper should applaud. His verbal extravagance offers an appropriately metonymic response to advertisers' overreach-by-design: Hilariously alert to consumption as sex, he likens the spray from Sunkist oranges to money shots, calls both food and nature photography pornographic, unmasks high fashion as "visual lesbianism."

Problems arise, however, when Harris's implicit reliance on a notion of the authentic collides with his refusal to spell that notion out. Though he argues that "it is sufficient for me to destroy . . . I do not have any answers to offer," on matters of pure taste he's as grouchily totalizing as Allan Bloom after two hours of Total Request Live: "The wholesale co-optation of youth culture by the record industry . . . has supplied an entire generation with a new opium of the people . . . that has supplanted all other forms of social intercourse, such as conversation." By never fully working out the Good lurking in the background, Harris's occasional ventures into I-hate-everything negationism produce an uneasy sense that he has nothing better to offer. Unlike his wonderfully clearheaded The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, which mourned the loss of closet-era traditions, here Harris leaves his reader without an alternative. The best and funniest parts of this book benefit from a vision of what consumerism has supplanted; when he dismisses everything, the result feels naggingly incomplete.

Still, despite spots of unproductive overkill, Harris's microscopic scrutiny of consumerism compels and repays close attention—it's the perfect companion for any foray through Restoration Hardware or the freezer compartment at Dean & DeLuca. —Jesse Berrett

Valencia
By Michelle Tea
Seal Press, 202 pp., $13
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Michelle Tea is queer San Francisco's spokespoet, a kind of Jack Kerouac for her generation of tattooed, hypercaffeinated Mission district dykes. Cofounder and cohost of Sister Spit (an annual, all-girl spoken-word traveling show), she's been performing her fast-moving, sharp-witted, substance-abusive, semiautobiographical writing for a decade. In 1998 she published her first novel, a stream-of-consciousness thing called The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, to mixed reviews. There, Tea strung together a collection of episodes from her youth—as a disaffected goth teenager, a baby dyke, and a prostitute—in fast-moving, half-bitchy prose.

A series of loosely linked, character-driven episodes, Tea's more polished second novel, Valencia, tells a story—if it tells one at all—about the relentless speed at which queer girls in San Francisco can break each other's hearts. "Michelle" (the underemployed, twentysomething poet who acts as the novel's narrator and hero) spends the book falling into and out of infatuation with an array of S.F.'s most eligible dykes—the depressed ones, the nonmonogamous ones, the ones who wear leather pants, and the ones who wear freedom rings. There's Willa, who won't take off her clothes, even to fuck; Gwynn, a recreational wrist-slasher; and Iris, the girl who finally breaks Michelle's heart wide open. Meanwhile, Tea takes us on a richly described adrenaline- and pot-spiked tour of San Fran's open-mic nights, Gay Pride celebrations, thrift stores, discos, and bedrooms. It's thrilling to read Tea's quirkily insightful, metaphor-driven prose ("My house," she writes, "had windows like big mouths eating the sky. You could sit in the windowsill and be its teeth, my favorite place to be") as we watch young Michelle figure out how to make her way in this world.

Relentlessly plotless, Valencia delights and frustrates all at once: Tea's characters are the very sort of marginalized queer girls who so rarely get to speak in print—they have a lot to say, and it's time we heard some of it. But, obsessed with the poetic contours of her hero's unmoored, youthful heartbreak, Tea doesn't clear any space for them to discuss (or joke about or ignore) the weighty complexity of their lives. Tea can write sentences that will make something giant inside you stir breathlessly. But until she figures out how to harness them to a story—or an idea, anything—they're just sentences with nowhere to go, spoken-word passages in need of a performer. —Rachel Mattson

The Art of Whitfield Lovell: Whispers From the Walls
Edited by Diana Block
University of North Texas Press, 88 pp., $25
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Bronx-born Whitfield Lovell, obsessed with junk art, historical memory, and antique photographs of African Americans, creates domestic scenes in which he charcoals portraits of anonymous ancestors onto clapboard walls. His figures are akin to Byzantine icons, commanding you to pay homage and contemplate the look in their eyes: wisdom? weariness? suspicion? pride? Formally posed and strangely footless, the shadowy figures exhumed from yesteryear make the prospect of ghosts visceral. They watch over rooms cluttered with flea market objects—a torn dress slung over a chair, abandoned playing cards, a dead bird entombed in a basket—imbued by Lovell with imagined history. The illusion is of trespassing, igniting the viewer's desire to touch another's debris, to finger another's history. —Lenora Todaro

Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply
By Vandana Shiva
South End Press, 146 pp., $14
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Worrying about starving future generations won't feed them. Food biotechnology will." So proclaimed Monsanto, the $9 billion U.S. agriculture and pharmaceuticals company, in one of its European advertising campaigns. A prominent Indian environmental activist, Vandana Shiva devotes Stolen Harvest—as she devotes her life—to debunking that "myth." In seven concise chapters, she provides a horrifying overview of the ways in which high-tech food-production techniques destroy the environment, shrink biodiversity, hurt farmers, destroy local economies, and potentially threaten the health of citizens worldwide.

If you're trying to comprehend the fury that animates protests against the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank, Shiva's book will help. In her view, a small number of megacorporations aided by exploitative international trade policies are running a "food dictatorship." They strip poor countries of their resources while forcing them to become consumers of previously unnecessary products.

Originally trained as a physicist, Shiva maps out her critique in a brisk, logical style, her outbursts of rhetoric against global patriarchy subordinated to a swift and devastating parade of facts. Monsanto floats a plan to market "terminator" seeds, which sprout into sterile plants. Mad cow disease spreads when normally herbivorous cows are fed the remains of diseased animals. Giant coastal shrimp farms contaminate drinking water, leaving Indian villagers to survive on government rations of one or two pots of water a day. Of course, few Indians can afford to buy shrimp. Most of it is destined for distant countries, among them the U.S.—which, with only about 4 percent of the world's population, consumes more than 40 percent of the world's resources.

The complexities of addressing those inequities can seem insurmountable. Coming from the culture that produced Gandhi, however, Shiva sees nothing softminded or unscientific in arguing that the most powerful weapon for change is a holistic, ecologically based worldview that begins by recognizing "the intrinsic value of all species." This "larger democracy of life," she writes, "is the real force of resistance against the brute power of the 'life sciences industry,' which is pushing millions of species to extinction and millions of people to the edge of survival." —Karen Cook

Live From the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975-1990
By August Kleinzahler
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 86 pp., $15 paper
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Offbeat, offhand, subtle, and unsettling, August Kleinzahler's verse startled and delighted readers of 1998's Green Sees Things in Waves. His valuable new book restores to print work from long-unavailable books and pamphlets, from The Sausage Master of Minsk (1977) to Earthquake Weather (1989). The first poems portray New York and ramshackle suburbs in northern New Jersey, where Kleinzahler grew up; the last describe San Francisco, where he resides. Poems in between visit Portugal, Idaho, ancient China, and Quebec. The typical Kleinzahler poem starts and ends with things seen: when "From FDR Drive the Children of Whitman Gaze Up," they watch how "Lavender smoke from the Con Ed stacks/assembles its tufts/into bubbles of thought (viz, the funnies) . . . " "Where Souls Go" seeks its spirits "among pigeons/or clustered round the D train's fan"; soon those souls zip "down the hill/and out of sight/soapbox derby heroes in a new dimension." Kleinzahler's most inventive lines seem at first to record how people talk—then they get stranger as we spend time with them. (If we have souls, do they have their own dimension? Or are they mere constructions, impotent as soapbox-cars?)

Compared to Green, these poems are smaller-scale—less often like stories, more often like sketches. But this Nile Club is hardly just a café—though like a café it's full of (disaffected and musical) people. The poems' habitués relate disarming dreams, play jazz, loaf around; they quit their jobs, move out of town, move back; sometimes they get their hearts broken. Set in Montreal, "The Last Big Snow" gives a deliberately quiet backdrop to what must be the last act of a long romance: "Those nights near the turning/when beacons on snowplows flashed until dawn,/and caravans of trucks/brought snow to the river as snow fell/on the river,/my love gave herself over to the making of broth/while I, in turn,/stirred until thick my greasy soup."

Kleinzahler's visual and verbal variety would be hard to overstate: Within a dozen pages, readers encounter balloonists, the Gobi Desert, the Hotel New Yorker, adolescent chess games, teenage sex, kumquats, wrestlers, "romance comics," and "cookies . . . like rancid dust." Longer acquaintance with Kleinzahler's verse brings greater admiration—readers learn to hear the jumps he loves between raffish and formal diction; the glides and leaps his line breaks turn out to perform; the balances he achieves among all five senses; and all the ways he's discovered to depict the impressions, small hopes, and brief encounters that make up most of every half-fortunate life—from Hackensack to San Francisco to Hong Kong. —Stephen Burt

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